Companies of the future: No CEO, no boss, managed by blockchain • Hacker News Board

Re: Companies of the future: No CEO, no boss, managed by blockchain

#31

Post by spiralx » Wed, Aug 16, 2017, 2:42 PM UTC

provost wrote: post #22

nosuchthing wrote: post #20

This documentary "Machines of Loving Grace" immediately comes to mind; https://thoughtmaybe.com/all-watched-over-by-machines-of-lov... Part one explores the myth that rose up in the 1990s that computers could create a new kind of stable world: They would bring about a new kind global capitalism purportedly free of risk and failure, without the boom and bust of the past, would abolish centralised political power, and…

I haven't read the works of Ayn Rand, but this quote makes her sound like a cult leader. Does the author of this documentary have a bit of a disdain for her, or is he merely saying that her readers/followers are misguided in some way?

> I haven't read the works of Ayn Rand, but this quote makes her sound like a cult leader.

Ayn Rand was very much like a cult leader if you read all about her and her followers, known as "The Collective".

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2009/11/09/possessed-3

https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0085E7E3E

Re: Companies of the future: No CEO, no boss, managed by blockchain

#32

Post by achow » Wed, Aug 16, 2017, 3:32 PM UTC

choxi wrote: post #30

achow wrote: post #28

Another thing I'm having hard time visualizing is how would innovation work or how to avoid 'design by committee', we have hard time as it is now to avoid new thinking not getting side swiped by legacy thinking in an organization.

A good place to start would be understanding the holocracy model and why it hasn't become more mainstream yet. Companies like Valve and Medium have experimented with flat organizations to varying degrees of success (I believe Medium ended their holacracy experiment in favor of a more traditional org structure). Personally, I believe decentralized organizations will look more like small markets than companies. You cou…

Thanks for the pointer.

Good example for Holocracy would be Zappos. Interesting read on their experience around it..

HOW A RADICAL SHIFT LEFT ZAPPOS REELING. http://fortune.com/zappos-tony-hsieh-holacracy/

Excerpts:

Employees were shocked and frustrated by the numerous mandates, the endless meetings, and the confusion about who did what.

Holacracy created new winners and losers—and it sparked fresh ideas. With experience and expertise de-emphasized, less “typical” and more junior types have been able to succeed. Introverts have benefited from the expectation that everybody speak in meetings.

Holacracy also lacks some crucial elements, such as a compensation process. The system doesn’t value seniority or the size of your budget. There are no formal performance evaluations. How, then, do you calculate how much to a pay a person, and for that matter, who makes the decision?

Holacracy’s value remains far from proven. Its creator, Robertson, says the process takes five to 10 years to be fully integrated—an eon in business.

Some 300 companies use his system—Zappos is easily the largest—and there have been failures. In early March, content site Medium announced it was abandoning it. Bud Caddell, a consultant who has studied self-management systems, says his former firm, Undercurrent, tried it without success. “I found it extremely dogmatic and rigid and overly complex, and it took attention away from our customers,” Caddell says.

Re: Companies of the future: No CEO, no boss, managed by blockchain

#33

Post by open_bear » Wed, Aug 16, 2017, 3:47 PM UTC

danmaz74 wrote: post #19

I don't see anything in this idea that can't be done without a blockchain. As a matter of fact, organizations based on the same principles have existed for (at least) a couple hundred years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooperative

Paraphrasing Sheldon fron "The Big Bang Theory": "Everything is better with blockchain".

Re: Companies of the future: No CEO, no boss, managed by blockchain

#34

Post by NotUsingLinux » Thu, Aug 17, 2017, 8:22 AM UTC

mc32 wrote: post #8

lifeisstillgood wrote: post #4

I don't get the revolution to the n'th degree thing. Companies in the modern world are ripe for really deep chnage (weird oasis of top down dictatorships in a democratic society, centrally planned economies trying to espouse free market thinking) Ronald Coase' theory of the firm tells us as organising anything gets easier firm sizes will shrink - and the Internet should make organising anything easier - the blockchai…

It's an exercise in thought and hive management. Will it work? Who knows. My concern is that while humans can be terrible managers, an automated system that has no checks (depending on how it's set up) could end up being worse if it does not take into account dealing with unforeseen challenges and repercussions if it's dissociated from people.

The point is I guess humans can only do so much, and the question now with a DAO is: Can we create Code/Algorithm than can align more people, "better" than a human manager could do?

Even if code only allows for "better" cooperation in some narrow dimensions, if these are important to the participants, this system will win.

DAOs are about scaling human collaboration.

It's not completely AI, but a way to understand ourselves in great masses better than we are able to to by ourselves.

Think about that.